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The Mountain Goats

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Photo by Steven Dewall

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Because he lives and works in the 21st century, John Darnielle uses computers and the Internet to disseminate his ideas, and guitars and recording studios to set them to music. But they would have found a way out somehow, regardless of the devices or means available at another time. Had he been born in 1767 instead of 1967, the Mountain Goats singer/songwriter might have been a soapbox climber, a town crier, a sage seer. We know exactly what 20th-century tools he would use: a dinky boom box, a bag of scrawled-on cassette tapes and a chest-collapsing dichotomy of wonder and dread. With his solo project-turned-band and decade-old prose and poetry blog — the incisive, outspoken Last Plane to Jakarta, a self-publishing house for erudite music criticism and elegant consecrations of the "gore-flecked, pitiless brutality" of Finnish heavy metal — Darnielle lets his inner monologue go awry, a deluge of emotions gathered into a river of words, delivered in stream-of-consciousness detail, the thrumming strum of guitars propelling a mind-racing narrator who yells through his nose about doomed Gulf Coast romances (Tallahassee) and redeemed Pacific Northwest methamphetamine circles (We Shall All Be Healed), in a high-wire voice hardwired into an electrical current. All Eternals Deck (Merge), Darnielle's seventh album since going into the studio in 2002, is a record of either battle-scarred peace or foreboding mortal war. More likely both. Nurses opens. Tickets $18. — Noah Bonaparte Pais